Winner of the Runners-up Prize for the American Book Award for 1985, this is a novel about America in its youth. The story takes place in 1811-12 in a frontier settlement in Richland County, Ohio, and is told through the diary of Thomas Keene -- an educated New Englander tormented by his past. The heart of the narrative is Tom's love for Fanny, a young widow, and his obsession with John Chapman, the half-crazed mystic who became known as Johnny Appleseed. Tom is not only a terse, powerful diarist, but also an artist, whose poems and paintings illuminate the text. The journal reveals every aspect of the American pioneering experience, and Tom's own spiritual journey. In the presence of violence and death, struggling with the dark aspects of sex, he saves himself through art and love. ISBN 0-06-015143-9 :

Even before his birth, Johnny Baker's life is in danger. His mother breaks the law when she has her fertilized egg endowed with genes that will give her son the potential to become a visual artist. Born in 2038, John Firth Baker is the first genetically engineered artist. At the age of nineteen, at the threshold of his career, he is murdered. Now, ten years after his death, Baker has become famous. An art curator has organized a show of his work, and his biography-culled from journals, e-mails, and interviews with those who knew him best-is published. The Song of the Earth is this "biography." It presents a powerful and haunting portrait of an artist as a young man in the twenty-first century. Baker is born into a world transformed by technology: genetic profiles, space travel, and controlled housing communities are commonplace. Global warming has altered the environment. A planetary gender war is raging, familial structures are shattered, and new religions contend with the old. Yet human needs remain the same: the search for love, the desire for approval, the longing for fame, and the quest for knowledge. The Song of the Earth is a hypnotic novel about our desire to control our destinies, our yearning for immortality, and the very human impulse to create art. With prose, poetry, and images, Nissenson tells an original tale that brilliantly captures the experience of another time and place.

Charles Wentworth, a heartbroken Puritan, comes to the New World from England in 1622 in search of salvation and a new beginning. Burdened with a lifelong struggle between his desire for faith and his doubts about God's love for him, he leaves the only land he has ever known after the death of his fiancée, in hopes of being freed of the temptations that torment him. A new masterpiece from National Book Award and Pen/Faulkner Award finalist Hugh Nissenson, The Pilgrim explores the foundation myths of America, a country settled by people intoxicated by the pursuit of God and yearning for redemption and freedom.